


Struggling for Normalcy

by Music09



Category: Original Work
Genre: Apocalypse, Rape/Non-con References, Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-28 03:39:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/669851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Music09/pseuds/Music09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One girl's survival is another man's salvation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Struggling for Normalcy

The end of the world didn’t end in fire nor in ice as the great Robert Frost predicted. Fire was a byproduct, and the ice came after the…event. It wasn’t global warming, although there quite a few tsunamis, tornadoes, and hurricanes before the event. Mighty aliens didn’t attack, superheroes didn’t destroy cities in the fight against evil, and the Earth didn’t decide to break out of orbit and crash into the Sun a few million years early. The end of the world happened because of Mother Nature herself. 

There weren’t warning signs that shit was about to hit the fan. Birds weren’t falling out of the sky and animals weren’t dropping dead. Plants weren’t dying by the acre either. Crops were still growing and flowers were still flowering like everything was dandy. The first sign…was the last sign anything was even amiss. People just started dropping dead. 

On August 13, 2019, a slew of calls were answered by the police and fire departments. Husbands were waking up with dead wives and mothers were waking with dead children. There was no explanation, only horror. The CDC couldn’t make head or tails of the situation. There wasn’t a biological cause because everybody would be sick. Besides that, the dead weren’t just located in one town or one state, it was worldwide. People all over the globe were waking to chaos. Car accidents and plane crashes were occurring all around the world as the drivers and pilots suddenly died. There was no rhyme or reason for the deaths.

One of Earth’s most populous species was being killed without a solution in sight. A vaccine couldn’t be made since a cause couldn’t be found. Within two months, half of the world’s population was wiped out. Granted, not all of it was due to the disease. Panicked citizens started riots in an effort to bring attention to their plights, or simply to gain food and water. Bodies were piling up in homes, apartments, hospitals…even in the streets where poor bastards had just “fallen asleep”. That’s what the media was calling it, “The Sleeping Sickness”, because people would just go to sleep, their hearts would just stop working. It was as if they were simply sleeping. 

Before the broadcasts went off air and the internet crashed, some speculation on the origin of the disease circled the science community. The reigning theory before communication truly died was the presence of genetic mutations in the survivors. The only explanation that could come close to explaining the tragedy was the appearance of a DNA mutation that prevented the survivors from dying. Maybe it created a suddenly needed protein or it broke down a molecule that the Earth was suddenly producing. Nobody knew what it was, and considering almost everyone trained to figure it out died, there wasn’t hope for closure on the topic. 

All of the dead bodies proved a hazard for the living. Sanitation was almost nonexistent at this point as most of the qualified workers died. Everything was going down the tubes. There weren’t enough people alive to keep the infrastructures of countries going. Governments were toppled as armies died out; in places such as Somalia, there were public executions to set examples to the terrified citizens. 

Four months out and barely 700,000 of the original seven billion people on Earth were alive. Towards the end of the pandemic, one could go days wandering without running into another soul, even in places like Chicago and New York City, which, for people of the female variety was a blessing. The sleeping sickness killed indiscriminately, it didn’t unfortunately, just target sadists and criminals. Meaning that a lone woman was in much greater danger outside of a secure building than before. They either learned to survive in this new world, or they died like everyone else…and not peacefully either.


End file.
